Kenelm Digby

Sir Kenelm Digby, who lived from 1603 to 1665, was an English courtier and diplomat who was also a highly reputed natural philosopher and a leading Catholic intellectual. The son of Sir Everard Digby, who was executed in 1606 for his part in the Gunpowder Plot, he studied at Gloucester Hall, Oxford, and was knighted by James I in 1623. After the death of his wife Venetia in 1633 he secluded himself at Gresham College and turned to scientific experiment, building a laboratory there with the Hungarian chemist Johannes Banfi Hunyades for botanical experiments. His two treatises of 1644, The Nature of Bodies and On the Immortality of Reasonable Souls, combined Aristotelianism with atomism, and he is credited with being the first to note the importance of vital air, or oxygen, to plants in his Discourse Concerning the Vegetation of Plants of 1661. He promoted the powder of sympathy, a remedy based on sympathetic magic, and is regarded as the father of the modern wine bottle for the strong glass bottles he made in a coal furnace at Newnham-on-Severn. He was a founding member of the Royal Society and corresponded with Fermat.